Mothers of Invention

By Sharon Cotliar

Something was wrong with Amilya Antonetti's son David. She knew it shortly after arriving home from the hospital six years ago. "He never turned that pinkish color babies turn," she says. "He looked gray, and he would cry until he passed out." At first doctors thought David was colicky and that his crying spells would end. They didn't, and his doctors diagnosed asthma and severe allergies, but they still couldn't explain what was sending David to the emergency room. "We were in and out of the hospital, and we were losing him," says his 32-year-old mother from San Leandro, Calif. Then, around David's first birthday, she discovered the trigger for her son's attacks: household cleaners, items she kept in her own kitchen cabinets. "Every time I cleaned the house, he'd have a major attack a couple of hours later. I didn't realize it until I started to keep a journal," she says. She made the connection while flipping through a couple of months of entries. But even then, Antonetti says she struggled to understand how such a normal routine could affect her son. She asked other moms if their kids reacted to any cleaning products. She also began doing research, and ultimately she went to homeopathic and medical doctors who confirmed that David could be allergic to these everyday items.

And that's how SoapWorks, a $2 million company that produces nontoxic, soap-based cleaning products, was born. Today, four years after starting the company in her garage, Antonetti employs 52 people, most of whom are themselves moms of children with severe allergies or other ailments.

Necessity may be the mother of invention. But now more than ever, it seems that motherhood is a springboard. In fact, so many mothers are taking the entrepreneurial plunge that they have earned their own label: mompreneurs. "Moms are noticing needs in the marketplace that their parenthood gives them the vision to see," says Ellen Parlapiano, co-author of Mompreneurs: A Mother's Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Work-at-Home Success. "They're filling those niches instead of waiting for someone else to do it."

Mompreneurs are often professionals who decided to stay at home to spend more time with their children. Those who are successful do what Antonetti did. They research whether a similar product or service exists; then they shop the idea around to other moms and stores to see if it's something others would purchase.

That's what Julie Aigner-Clark of Littleton, Colo., did after she developed Baby Einstein, her first educational video for infants. A former schoolteacher, Aigner-Clark, 33, was still pregnant with her first daughter, Aspen, when she came across research showing that children learn foreign languages more easily when they are exposed to a variety of language sounds during infancy.

It was about a year later when Aigner-Clark, busy raising her baby, and her husband Bill borrowed video equipment and began filming Baby Einstein in their basement. "It took forever," she recalls. "It was all done at night, after my husband came home from work and Aspen went to bed." The award-winning video features images and toys favored by her 1 1/2-year-old daughter, with an audio backdrop of songs and nursery rhymes spoken by mothers in seven different languages. Aigner-Clark hired the women from a nearby language school and instructed them to speak in "motherese," the universal, high-pitched tone that many mothers use when talking to their children.

Finished video in hand, Aigner-Clark set out to find a store that would sell it, which is where her success story really begins. She spent two full days at a toy trade show looking for someone from the Right Start, a retail and catalog company that sells developmentally appropriate toys and products for infants and toddlers. "I literally hunted down the sales representatives," she says. It took several follow-up phone calls and letters, but eventually the Right Start agreed to sell the video. When it hit the shelves in 1997, it quickly became one of the company's best-selling items, and Aigner-Clark was being asked what else she had made. "The answer was nothing," she says with a laugh.

Not anymore. Baby Einstein's new sibling videos include Baby Mozart, Baby Bach and, the latest release, Baby Shakespeare. Each capitalizes on Aigner-Clark's love of the humanities and her customers' desire to raise brighter babies. The videos are sold at a variety of stores. Sales reached $4.5 million last year.

Women-owned businesses have more than doubled in the past 12 years, to 9.1 million. These businesses employ 27.5 million people and generate more than $3.6 trillion in sales, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners (NFWBO), which bases its research on census data. Surveys suggest that 64% of female business owners are married, 80% have children, and 44% have children or elderly parents living with them.

"We're going to see continued growth of businesses owned by women," predicts Sharon Hadary, executive director of the NFWBO. "We're also going to see the size and sophistication of these businesses grow larger and more substantial. We're already seeing it."

What's driving this growth? "Frustration with the lack of flexibility in corporate America," says Hadary, "and a sense they could not make a difference are the main reasons women give for leaving their jobs and starting their own businesses." With e-mail and the Internet, business can be done anywhere. "Women are recognizing they can in fact take control of their lives and destiny. There isn't one way to have a career or family," she says.

For many mompreneurs, the key attraction is being their own boss. Former New York City television producer Dana Lowey Luttway anointed her son Daniel Henri "the king of spit-up" but was inspired by his daily rejections to create her first invention: the ParentSmock, a cotton bib made for parents, with cute expressions including DAD'S SPIT'N IMAGE, BURP ME, I'M YOURS and ALL-STAR DRIBBLER.

"All my friends loved it," says Lowey Luttway, 37, who left her TV job when her boy was born 2 1/2 years ago. "But store owners were on the fence. It didn't blow them away." Eventually, she convinced Babies "R" Us to order the smock, and she has since recouped her initial $25,000 investment. But it's her second invention, the StrollerStand, a kickstand for strollers, that Lowey Luttway, now the mother of two, thinks will be a big success. "If you've ever pushed an umbrella stroller packed with shopping bags, you know the minute you take your kid out, it tips over," she says, speaking from experience.

Armed with a prototype and a patent pending, Lowey Luttway talked to smaller independent stores and bigger chain stores to see if they were interested. This time, she says, "the response has been tremendous." She already has orders from a host of smaller stores and a tentative agreement with Babies "R" Us to sell the StrollerStand, which she expects to gross $500,000 a year. She has also launched a website, ParentWise.com where she encourages other moms to send in their own ideas, in return for which she promises to pay them a licensing fee. What she has found, however, is that many of her site's visitors (30,000 hits since July) are looking for advice on how to become entrepreneurs themselves. "It just shows what a desire there is out there to start up your own business and make money," she observes. Her advice to other would-be mompreneurs: "Look for a product that serves a function that is truly unique, something that is a must-have instead of a nice-to-have." And when gauging whether the product is marketable, she says, "don't just ask your friends."

That approach certainly helped Antonetti. Before launching SoapWorks, Antonetti put an advertisement in her local penny paper that read, "Calling All Moms: Mom looking to start a company, and I need your help. If you could create your perfect cleaning solution and body-care products, what would it look like? Providing free lunch, guaranteed entertainment. Bring your kids."

More than 220 mothers turned out. Antonetti had prepared lunch for 30. "The response I got from other mothers was amazing," she says. It was in response to the meeting that Antonetti convinced her lawyer husband Dennis Karp that they should sell their four-bedroom house and her Mercedes and move to a smaller house down the hill so that they would have enough money to start a manufacturing business. "The hardest thing for most moms is the fear factor of starting their own business," she says. "Once they get over that, it's easy." Above all, advises Antonetti, "trust your own instincts." After all, they're likely to be the instincts of a mother.